Cyril and Methodius Church siege

The Cyril and Methodius Church siege was a six-hour siege that occurred on 18 June 1942 when 750 German SS soldiers besieged seven Czechoslovakian paratroopers in the Czech Orthodox Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague, Czechoslovakia following Operation Anthropoid. The assassins of Reinhard Heydrich had been hidden in the crypt under the floor by chaplain Vladimir Petrek, who was sympathetic to their anti-Nazi convictions. The SS assaulted the building after torturing the young Ata Moravec into giving up the resistance fighters' location, and the resistance fighters Jozef Gabcik, Jan Kubis, Adolf Opalka, Josef Valcik, Jaroslav Svarc, Josef Bublik, and Jan Hruby held off the Nazis for six hours. Svarc committed suicide after being wounded, Opalka was gunned down, and Kubis was mortally wounded, and Gabcik, Valcik, Bublik, and Hruby hid in the crypt. Members of the Czech Fire Brigade had to pump water into the crypt in an attempt to flush out their countrymen, who had survived machine-gun fire through the wall. The parachutists took their own lives with their last rounds of ammunition, bringing the siege to an end. The Czechoslovak Resistance was virtually wiped out after the siege, and thousands of innocent Czechoslovaks were massacred in Nazi reprisals; nevertheless Adolf Hitler's third-in-command and Holocaust mastermind Heydrich was dead, and the Czechoslovaks proved to the Allies that they could stand up against the Nazis.